Back to the Future: 1914 Seattle Imagines 2014 Seattle

So we may have found a new favorite website--last night, a friend pointed us to the seriously awesome image to the right, courtesy of Vintage Seattle, a high-resolution visual blog documenting Seattle history, a labor of love undertaken by one Jess Cliffe.

There's plenty of fantastic stuff at Vintage Seattle (we've only barely begun to sort through it), but nothing's struck us so much as this pic, posted back on Jan. 3: According to Cliffe, this is an artist's rendering of what Pine St. will look like in 2014, originally published in a magazine/brochure called Cosmogram back in 1914. You can see the original post here or click the image to be taken to the high-res version (the lo-res just doesn't do it justice).

Aside from the vaguely fascist undertones and reference to some sort of Babylon-on-Puget-Sound, the pic is actually sort of prescient--as Cliffe points out, that thing in the background looks an awful lot like a proto-Space Needle. But what strikes us is the sense of promise in the picture, the idea that the sky's the limit. Given our current impasse over every last transit and development plan, the contemporary Seattleite is liable to look back at such optimism as naive if not downright stupid.

But back then, there was real reason to believe such a future was possible. The famous Bogue Plan, envisioning a future of trains linking us to far-flung parts like Kirkland and which would have turned Mercer Island into a city park, had only been defeated in 1912. And while the voters bought the business community's line on the plan (It's too expensive! Taxes! Taxes!), those with vision could still have faith that someday, they'd get the sort of transit system and community spaces a great city needs. Compare the 1914 artist's vision to the far more concrete Bogue Plan's envisioned Seattle Center (below) from only a few years earlier, and far from seeming naive, the artist's projection looks like a reasonable presumption based on current expectations..

All of which leaves us all the more depressed that the same logic that killed the Bogue Plan in 1912 continues to rule the day; narrow interests instill fear in the electorate that every last attempt to solve our transportation and development problems are too expensive, and the voters kill almost every attempt made at resolving hole we've been digging ourselves into ever since we decided that Virgil Bogue's plan was too ambitious for Seattle. All that's changed in the last century is the scale of our vision; whereas once we imagined a glorious cosmopolis to stand amongst the world's great cities, today we're fighting over whether to build rail or just keep throwing money at buses.